Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Conservation icon Grey Owl left a complicated legacy

Grey Owl, born in England in 1888 as
Archie Belaney, emigrated to Canada as a teen, where he assumed the
identity of a First Nations man and became an early icon of the
conservation movement.Service
Grey Owl is this province’s, perhaps this country’s, most beloved imposter. He became the first face of Canada’s
conservation movement. He lived in the forest, in a small log cabin. His
neighbours were a family of beavers. He wrote books and toured the
world, speaking passionately about the need to conserve the natural
world.
“No man was more important to the Canadian environmental
consciousness,” wrote Kenneth Brower in Atlantic Monthly magazine in
1990.
All those years living in northern Saskatchewan, writing books and
living off the trap line, he was believed to be an Ojibway man.
Only after his death in 1938 was it revealed he was lying about who he was. Grey Owl was actually an English man named
Archibald Belaney. Despite dressing like an Ojibway man, living off the
land, he was an imposter...http://thestarphoenix.com/news/saskatchewan/canada-150-grey-owl?utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_source=Twitter&utm_term=Autofeed#link_time=1484606304